“Rebecca Puhl and her colleagues at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale B-School-Isnt-What-It-Used-To-Be University report that bias against heavy people is as common in the United States as racial bias, and is more common than bias based on sexual orientation, nationality/ethnicity, physical disability, and religious beliefs.” Read more . . . .

“Taller people are reported to be more persuasive, more likely to be leaders, and more attractive as mates. Now add another wrinkle to the height thing–according to Buunk and his colleagues, short men are more likely to be jealous.” Read more . . .

Placebo has its effect through our beliefs and expectations. Because we get many of our assumptions through culture, changing social attitudes could alter how effective it is. Placebo is sometimes called the ‘expectancy effect’ and describes the fact that our expectations of what the dummy treatment will do can influence the outcome. Read more . . .

Research on the role of emotion/intuition in moral judgments is really heating up. For decades (millennia, even), moral judgment was thought to be a conscious, principle-based process, but over the last few years, researchers have been showing that emotion and intuition, both of which operate automatically and unconsciously for the most part, play a much larger role than most philosophers and psychologists had previously been willing to admit. In this context, two recent papers by roughly the same group of people have presented some really interesting findings which, if you ask me (and if you’re reading this, that’s what you’re doing, damnit), really muddy the picture, but in a good way. Read more . . .

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This entry was posted on April 20, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Blogroll.
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